The clock ran out on the Illinois state legislative session last night at midnight, but the decision on whether to pass legislation for a Chicago Bears stadium remained alive until this morning, when the Illinois house finally stuck a fork in it by adjourning without a vote. After the collapse of the team’s preferred megaprojects tax break bill over the weekend (Chicago Daily Herald: “Bears property tax break bill sacked“), state senators had worked frantically to issue a new bill (Capitol News Illinois: “Hail Mary effort to keep Bears in Illinois”), which cleared the senate at nearly 4 am (Chicago Tribune: “Illinois Senate in overtime passes last-ditch public stadium legislation”) and headed to the state house, which decided to take its ball and go home.
Setting aside sports metaphors equating passing stadium subsidies with scoring a touchdown — please, please stop doing that, people — what the hell actually happened this weekend, and where do things stand now with the Bears and their possible future homes? Let’s recap:
- Late Saturday, after discussion of limiting legislation to only applying to the Bears to avoid handing tax breaks to billions of dollars of other projects, State Sen. Bill Cunningham declared the megaprojects bills dead, saying too many senate Democrats were opposed to the state subsidizing any Bears move out of Chicago to suburban Arlington Heights. Still, Cunningham said, he hoped to offer the Bears something by submitting legislation on Sunday that would put Chicago and Arlington Heights “on an equal plane.”
- On Sunday night at 11 pm, Cunningham introduced a bill to allow any municipality in Cook County with more than 70,000 residents to create a sports authority to own new stadiums. This would enable the Bears to get out of paying any property taxes on a stadium — though the bill specified that they would pay property taxes on any surrounding team-owned stadium district.
- Nearly four hours after the midnight deadline for a bill, the senate voted 37-17 to approve Cunningham’s sports authorities bill. Rather than fake an 11:59 pm time stamp as the Illinois legislature did for a White Sox stadium bill in 1988, this time the legislature used a different end run trick play gambit, evading a rule that bills passed after the session ends need a supermajority vote by putting no effective date on the bill, allowing it to go into effect next June, which would nullify the increased vote requirement.
- The bill then headed to the state house, which at 4:30 am adjourned without taking action on the sports authority bill.
While it’s kind of moot now, it’s worth taking a quick look at what Cunningham’s bill would have cost relative to previous proposals. Under a sports authority plan, Bears owner George McCaskey would have gotten a bigger tax break for a stadium owned by a sports authority, paying no taxes at all rather than a negotiated payments in lieu of taxes rate. Instead of saving an estimated $39 million a year, he would have saved an estimated $53 million a year, pushing the total present value of the stadium tax break from around $670 million to around $900 million. Making the surrounding property taxable, though, would have prevented McCaskey from getting more than a billion dollars in additional tax breaks for the rest of his planned development.
However, in a series of posts late last night, Center Square sports subsidy reporter Jon Styf noted that even though Cunningham said the Bears would pay for stadium construction, his bill would have allowed a stadium authority to sell bonds to pay for stadium infrastructure — and potentially pay it off by siphoning off sales tax revenues from a stadium district. It’s hard to guess how much this would have added to the total public cost, but it could have been hefty indeed if a stadium district were large enough.
Meanwhile, none of this would have actually authorized a stadium — it would just have authorized Arlington Heights, or Chicago, or Cicero or Schaumburg or Evanston, to create sports authorities to grant McCaskey his get-out-of-property-taxes-free card (and potential infrastructure bonds). With Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson having been vocal about wanting to offer team ownership a new stadium on the Chicago lakefront, it could easily have led to Chicago and Arlington Heights going toe to toe to win McCaskey’s heart, which could have gotten pricey for taxpayers.
None of that is happening now, though, at least not unless Bears execs decide to put off a stadium decision in hopes of a potential special session of the legislature later this summer. The team issued a brief statement this morning reading, “We will finalize our evaluation of both Arlington Heights and Hammond, and remain on the late spring/early summer timeline that we have previously communicated,” which manages to be a threat to move to Indiana without actually closing the door on Illinois, well played. Until we hear back from them, add the Bears mess to the Tampa Bay Rays mess as situations where we won’t know the final score (dammit!) for a while yet.
I’m happy that however this turns out that mega-projects is likely DOA. Going from one (very) bad stadium deal for taxpayers to an infinite amount of projects over $100M could have been disastrous.
I do wonder what Pritzker’s thinking in all of this was. Why did he throw any support at all for this legislation if he wasn’t sure it had the votes?
As for the Bears, I guess it’s time to show their cards.
Hallelujah. Both the megaproject bill and last minute stadium authority bill were abominations.
I hope this is the end of it for Illinois but the outward nonchalance of both Pritzker and McCaskey worries me that there’s a plan C. Neither seemed eager to lobby this weekend. I hope that truly is because they never really had the votes.
I got worried when they put out the idea of a publicly owned stadium. It’d be nothing but a money pit.
Here’s hoping that Indiana will pay for our stadium.
There’s really no functional difference between a publicly owned stadium and a privately owned one with built-in property tax breaks. The game is all in who owns the revenue streams and who’s responsible for the debt, not whose name is on the deed.
Didn’t all stadiums used to be publicly owned?
No, never. The Dodgers, for one, have never played in a publicly owned stadium, either in Brooklyn or L.A.
The really simplified timeline is: 19th century through 1950s: stadiums built and owned privately > 1960s through 1980s: stadiums built and owned by public but teams paid off public debt via rent > 1990s through today: stadiums built and owned by public and teams don’t pay anything.
This was so strange. Either a lot of Chicago reps just refused to commit either way until the last minute, or Maria Pappas’ revenue analysis was really that influential (guessing it’s probably the former).
I doubt cramming it through before anyone could read it was a deliberate tactic; the bill really was written in a mad dash. The language of the initial draft introduced an hour before midnight would have actually *excluded* Arlington Heights from inclusion! The language limited the scope of the bill to cities with more than 70k people, located “entirely” within counties with more than 3 million people. There is a tiny blip of land in Arlington Heights that bumps into Lake County, so AH is not “entirely” within Cook County. Someone looked at a detailed map, as Cunningham immediately filed a quick amendment eliminating the word “entirely.” (See the text of the 3rd amendment introduced last night: “Provides that any home rule municipality with a population of 70,000 or more residents that is located (rather than entirely located) in a county with a population of more than 3,000,000 residents…”)
The Illinois legislature often seems to resemble an underachieving college freshman cramming for his finals, because they often act like an underachieving college freshman cramming for his finals. But I have no idea where this goes now. Was it better than nothing? Arguable! Cunningham and Kam might have been better off faking a tummy ache.
Hallelujah!!! If Indiana is stupid enough to stick the taxpayers with the bill, have at it!!!
Unfortunately, they are!
Arlington Heights doesn’t go into Lake County- I know because I grew up on the Lake County side of Buffalo Grove that borders it.
That said, Schaumburg would’ve been excluded since part of Schaumburg is in DuPage county.
Off-topic, but my wife lived in the then-unincorporated part of Wheeling in Lake County (now part of Buffalo Grove).
Our marriage license erroneously states that she was from Cook County and I live in mild fear that she’ll someday use that as a loophole. :-)
A tiny sliver of Arlington Heights indeed goes into Lake County. I know this because there is a map of it:
https://data-lakecountyil.opendata.arcgis.com/documents/lakecountyil::village-of-arlington-heights/explore
That’s why they filed the amendment. It’s a bizarre historical anomaly and their attempt to limit this strictly to Cook County nearly screwed the entire thing.